News, Interviews, and Miscellanea from the desk of Garrett Calcaterra.

Monday, May 12, 2014

Life and Stuff

So, I've continued my abysmal blogging performance through the Spring of 2014, but it's actually a good thing (or at least that's what I'm telling myself). I've been making a concerted effort to cut back on the time I spend (i.e. waste) on social media, and instead have been focusing on writing and, you know, trying to maintain a personal life. In fact, after almost five years of dating, I finally proposed to my girlfriend, Mandy Burke. We're engaged and looking at getting married soon. Pretty crazy! Six years ago, I was relegated to being single for life, and was perfectly content being so. I was happy enough with myself, with reading, writing, hiking, drinking beer, etc. You can imagine my surprise when I met a woman who actually liked me! Even more shocking was the discovery that life is actually better with a good partner.

So yes, I'm quite happy with the unexpected turn of events, and even more determined to forge a solid writing career. Along those lines, here's what I have to report:

I'm making good progress on The Faceless Enemy, my sequel to Dreamwielder. I'm a little more than halfway through the first draft and am building up a head of steam to hopefully finish the second half in a mad sprint. This book is even more fast paced and darker than the first one, and I'm really pushing myself to craft a story that will mesmerize readers.

I wrote a guest blog for my Alma Mater, Pacific University, on my experience over the last few years as an author and how the publishing world is changing.

I managed to attend one day at WonderCon. I didn't catch any panels, but as always, it was good people watching, and I got to meet up with my friend and collaborator, Craig Comer, who has put together a very awesome fantasy realms blog called Realm Tramper.

My novelette, The Knight's Dog has racked up an impressive 32k reads since March over at Wattpad. Wattpad is a very cool site/app for reading free e-books. If you haven't checked it out already, I recommend you do so. I'll be releasing a sneak preview from The Faceless Enemy there in the next month or two.

That's all for now. I have a couple of other small projects floating around and hopefully one or more will land with a home soon. If and when they do, I'll be sure to fire off a quick post.